Susan Fleet Books in Order

Susan Fleet was born in Massachusetts, and music got to her early. She started trumpet lessons with her uncle at eight and joined the musicians' union at fifteen, young enough to still be in school and already old enough to be playing professional gigs.

Music came first.

She later studied with Armando Ghitalla and Roger Voisin, both principal trumpeters of the Boston Symphony. As a freelancer in the Boston area, she played just about everything, Broadway musicals, the Ringling Brothers Circus, operas, orchestral concerts, chamber brass, and solo recitals on both modern and historical trumpets. Teaching became a big part of her life too. Fleet taught at Brown University, Wheaton College, UMass Lowell, and Berklee College of Music. At Berklee she created a course on female musicians and hosted Women in Music forums.

She also likes digging into overlooked stories. That led to a long stretch of music history work. For the first International Women's Brass Conference in 1993, she researched female brass players and helped document the names and accomplishments of hundreds of women. In 2005 she uncovered the story of the Original Shades of Blue, a forgotten all-woman band, and helped bring fresh attention to them. A 1992 meeting with early trumpet soloist Edna White also fed into later writing about women musicians, including Women Who Dared.

Before the crime novels, Fleet had already done plenty of writing, speaking, and producing. She created the three-part video documentary Growing Up in America: 1900-1920 while hosting a Rhode Island radio show with music, news, and interviews. She also wrote biographical and historical pieces on musicians ranging from Carmen McRae and Hazel Scott to Antonia Brico and Oscar Levant. Her 1993 recording Baroque Treasures for Trumpet and Organ shows the performing side of that work.

Then the dark side showed up.

By her own telling, Fleet began writing crime fiction while teaching at Berklee in Boston. She has joked that her print journalist father, who taught her to play pool in a police station, may have nudged her in that direction. In 2001 she moved to New Orleans, survived Katrina, and found the city that would shape much of her fiction.

Her first Frank Renzi thriller, Absolution, came out in 2008 and won the Premier Book Award for mystery, suspense, and thriller the following year. Books like Diva, Natalie's Revenge, Jackpot, Foulshot, and Guilty keep returning to the things she clearly enjoys exploring, obsession, revenge, damaged people, pressure inside police work, and the pull of place. New Orleans matters in these books, and so does Boston.

Fleet also writes the Dark Deeds true crime volumes, which collect cases about serial killers, stalkers, and domestic homicides. That side of her work feels connected to the novels. In both, she is interested in motive, behavior, and what happens when fear or obsession takes over a life. She still plays trumpet every day and has long divided her time between Boston and New Orleans, which feels fitting for a writer whose work is built from equal parts discipline, curiosity, and mayhem.